Skip to main content

A Two Faced Story

Greed has many masks but just one face. The news of TARP banks laying off American workers to replace with H1-Bs will provoke a lot of anger and righteous indignation (as can be imagined). The entire desi IT community (which is a large part of the H1-B pool) will be tarred by the same brush with the locals looking upon each one of us as the cause of all their unemployment woes.

It will scarcely cross their minds that we have widely varying levels of skills, education and talents so heaping blame on the collective is a pointless exercise. Our "Coming to America" stories are as diverse as we are as a people - and many of them are quite tragic. And that is just the desi half of the immigration story. The other half is fully made in America, and enabled by the very people who rile against it.

There is something fundamentally wrong about a system where the cost of the goods and services are out of reach of the average person, if all of those employed in producing them are local employees compensated adequately for their cost of living. Unless that problem is solved, American employers will be forced to seek out lower wages and operating costs just so their businesses can survive. While it begins as a fundamental survival tactic, greed is inevitable and is what pushes them to reach well past filling the basic need.

The suicide of rice farmers in India is also a consequence of corporate greed helped by a compliant bureaucracy. While this story is unfolding in very different circumstances half way around the world from America, the dramatis personae are no different. In both cases, the consumers are accomplices without whose tacit participation none of this would have become possible.

In a hypothetical scenario, the son of an Indian farmer dependent on GM seeds, might work unbelievably hard to pull his family out of the death spiral they are caught in, get an education and finally a job in IT. He may end up working in America for a third of prevailing wages in the IT organization of the very GM seed company that is driving his family and community back home to suicide.

This Indian "code-coolie" would be viewed by the local technology worker he displaced as the enemy. The desi in this equation would find it impossible to tell friend and foe apart. When all the masks of greed are peeled of, the face is revealed to be one and the same. It is the face that drives people to the edge of death and despair - with consumers being very much part of the problem and contributing to the perpetration itself.

Comments

KeepingItSimple said…
A very apt story of current times. Ironic isn't it ?

Nice write up. Keep it up.
Heartcrossings said…
KeepingItSimple - Irony it is indeed but it seems to escape people almost completely ! Thanks for stopping by.

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques